DAMASCUS FIGHTING raged across Syria and air raids struck near Damascus and in the north on Saturday after a ceasefire declared for Eid Al Adha fell apart, with nearly 200 killed since it was due to take effect.
The truce for Eid Al Adha that started on Friday — conditionally agreed by the regime and the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) — had raised the prospect of the first real halt to the fighting after 19 months of conflict. But after fresh fighting on both Friday and Saturday, rebels and a monitoring group declared the ceasefire well and truly dead.
As clashes between President Bashar al Assad’s forces and rebels continued, a Syrian warplane struck a building in a rebel-held area east of Damascus that has been the scene of heavy fighting for weeks, killing eight.
“This was the first fighter jet air strike since the declaration” of a truce for the four-day holiday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. “The truce is dead,” the group’s director Rami Abdel Rahman commented. “We can no longer talk of a truce.” Another air strike hit near the Wadi Deif military base in the northwestern province of Idlib, where rebel forces have been battling for control of the facility, it said.
A rebel commander in the northern city of Aleppo said there was no doubt the ceasefire initiative, proposed by UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, had collapsed.
“This is a failure for Brahimi. This initiative was dead before it started,” Abdel Jabbar al Okaidi, head of the FSA military council in Aleppo, said over the telephone.
He insisted the FSA had not broken the ceasefire and was only carrying out defensive actions.
“I was on several fronts yesterday and the army did not stop shelling,” Okaidi said. “Our mission is to defend the people, it is not us who are attacking.” The Observatory, a key monitor of the conflict, said 146 people were killed in bombings and fighting on Friday, including 53 civilians, 50 rebels and 43 members of Assad’s forces.
On Saturday, fresh violence killed at least another 48 people, the Observatory said, amid clashes and attacks in Damascus province, Aleppo, Idlib, Daraa in the south and the eastern city of Deir Ezzor.
Among the dead were five killed in a car bomb attack in Deir Ezzor, it said. State television blamed the attack on “terrorists” and said the bomb had gone off in front of a church, causing significant damage.
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